Alexander Saxton, novelist, racial historian

Published 6:20 pm, Saturday, September 1, 2012

Alexander Saxton, who would go on to become a prominent historian of race in America, summed himself up in a blurb on the dust jacket of his first novel, "Grand Crossings," published when he was 24.

"At various times," he said, he had worked as "a harvest hand, construction gang laborer, engine-wiper, freight brakeman, architectural apprentice, assistant to the assistant editor" of a union newspaper, railroad switchman and columnist for The Daily Worker.

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But in his biographical blurb, the young Saxton accomplished the first of many self-transformations. They included passage from upper-income childhood to working-class adulthood; from Harvard student to Chicago laborer; from novelist to union organizer and Socialist; from activist to academic.

He made his final self-transformation on Aug. 20 — at age 93 — in choosing to end his life. Saxton, an avid outdoorsman who had been in failing health for several years, died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Lone Pine, Calif., said his daughter, Catherine Steele.

"He felt the terms of his life were his to decide," she said. The act of choosing, which defined his life as well as his death, accounted for the unique perspective he brought to each new sphere of his experience, she added.

In all those spheres, Saxton made significant contributions. His three novels were widely praised for the three-dimensional scope he gave to the working-class men and women he portrayed, black and white. His first novel, published in 1943, was translated into 15 languages. He became a full-time organizer of maritime workers and longshoremen in San Francisco, which he did while writing prolifically for left-wing publications of all kinds, from the smallest union newsletter to The Nation magazine.

At 43, when the Cold War climate and the blacklisting of Communists made it impossible for him to find publishers for his fiction, he went back to college. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and not long afterward became a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His contributions as a cultural historian are considered his most enduring.

Saxton's first historical book, "The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California," became a landmark of labor history, describing how 19th- and 20th-century labor unions used racism against Chinese immigrants as a tool for unifying and organizing white union members.

The critical success of the book helped Saxton establish the first Asian-American studies program in the United States at UCLA in the early 1980s.

Saxton, who was a member of the U.S. Communist Party in the '30s and '40s, was called to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1950s. By then, he had published his 1948 novel, "The Great Midland," and was at work on a third, "Bright Web in the Darkness," published in 1958 but less widely reviewed. After that, he wrote several novels but could not get any of them published.